A top Pacific Gas and Electric Co. executive told regulators that the company's ad-campaign acknowledgment that it had "lost its way" before the San Bruno disaster referred to a loss of focus on "basic operations," but not specifically to safety problems.

Jane Yura, PG&E vice president for gas operations standards and policies, is the highest-ranking company official to testify at state Public Utilities Commission hearings into allegations that the utility violated safety laws leading up to the September 2010 explosion of a natural-gas pipeline. The blast and subsequent fire killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes.

The company could face more than $500 million in fines. In the hearings in San Francisco before two administrative law judges, PG&E has defended its pre-explosion safety record as having measured up to industry standards and said the hearings amounted to a pointless search "for someone to blame."

Ad effort

Several parties are involved in the case, including the customer-advocate group The Utility Reform Network. Its attorney, Tom Long, questioned Yura during her testimony Monday about the $10 million ad campaign last summer that featured CEO Tony Earley saying PG&E "lost its way" before he took over in 2011, but stressing its employees "clearly haven't."

"Do you agree based on what you observed that PG&E had lost its way?" Long asked.

Yura replied that the company had been "pursuing many things on many avenues" before the explosion. What Earley was referring to in the ad, she said, "really was about the fact that we need to focus on the core operations and basics of the business, and that is where we had lost our way, that we had really begun to pursue many policy and other energy objectives, and perhaps along that we had lost focus essentially on the basic operations."

Long asked if Earley's statement referred to PG&E having lost its focus on safety.

"I don't believe we lost focus on safety," Yura said. "But I believe we lost focus in terms of keeping up with the changes in the industry and improving our practices and our processes. And we had been a little static as a result."

Long also asked Yura about PG&E's reaction to the findings of a blue-ribbon panel that the utilities commission created to look into the disaster. The panel concluded that PG&E had been more concerned about profits than safety.

"I would say I personally don't know that we disagree or agree," Yura said. "We have accepted it."

The panel also concluded that PG&E had a "dysfunctional" corporate culture that placed safety far down the priority list. Yura, who has been with the utility for 35 years and assumed her current position last year, disputed that.

'We could improve'

"I believe we had goals and we have objectives in that area," she said. "We were focused. But again, we could improve."

Based on industry performance scales, she said, PG&E was in the "middle of the road" in its gas-safety efforts before the explosion. Now, she said, the company wants to be an industry leader.

Yura would not say, however, whether any of the company's new efforts were aimed at addressing problems that federal and state regulators cited in investigations of the 2010 disaster. Those problems included record-keeping gaps that led, among other things, to PG&E not knowing the construction quality of its San Bruno pipeline.

Britt Strottman, an attorney for the city of San Bruno, asked Yura if PG&E has created its new quality-assurance department because of the "many errors and omissions" in its records.

'Permanent' changes

"I would say it (the creation of the department) stems from a lot of the lessons learned through the San Bruno incident," Yura said. But she stressed that PG&E's main goal in forming the department was to make sure safety efforts were sustained and "very permanent."

"So the answer (to) my question is that 'yes,' that you have this new department because of the many errors and omissions in PG&E's gas operations leading up to the explosion?" Strottman asked.